(Note: I haven’t been very involved with the planning for this year’s exercise, mostly leaving it to Ruby)
I quite like it as a real trust-building exercise. I think overall actually getting 100+ people on the internet to not take a destructive action like this is surprisingly hard, and I think it is a really great, surprisingly unique, attribute of our communities that we can coordinate on making things like this happen.
I find myself reasonably compelled by some of the arguments for something like “asking for opt-in before sending the codes”, though I don’t yet actually have a logistically good way of making this happen. I think having a whole two-step process where you ask people to register themselves on a list is quite onerous, and probably wouldn’t get a great response rate.
A thing that feels more reasonable to me is to instead of sending out the codes in the email in plain text, instead you get a link to a form that shows you the code at the end, after 1-2 boxes of dialog that ask you whether you are OK with there potentially being real consequences of you using these codes. It’s still not great, and it would still be hard to distinguish the people who opted-in and received the codes but decided not to use them from the people who just decided to not receive their codes in the first place (which is a safer move in the end, if you want to make sure you don’t use them).
What would you think of making button pressers anonymous? Currently, I will definitely not press the button because I know that this could plausibly lead to negative social consequences for me, and be clearly tied to my identity. Which is a purely self-interested thing, rather than me actually taking agency and choosing not to unilaterally destroy the world, and demonstrating myself to be worthy of trust. I imagine this is true for other people too? Which, to me, majorly undercuts the community ritual and trust-building angles
Alternately, maybe the social consequences are how people are coordinating?
For me, Petrov’s (and Arkhipov’s) legacy, the most important lesson, is that, in real MAD life, there should be no button at all.
Seeing Neel & Habryka’s apparent disagreement (the latter seems to think this is pretty hard, while the former thinks that the absence of incentives to press the button makes it too easy), I realize that it’d be interesting to have a long discussion, before the next Petrov Day, on what is the goal of the ritual and what we want to achieve with it.
My point: it’s cool practicing “not pressing buttons” and building trust on this, and I agree with Neel we could make it more challenging… but the real catch here is that, though we can bet the stability of some web pages on some sort of Assurance Game, it’s a tremendous tragedy that human welfare has to depend on the willingness of people like Petrov to not press buttons. I think this game should be a reminder of that .
To clarify my position, I PERSONALLY find not pressing the button extremely easy, because I am strongly incentivised to not do it. This means that I don’t personally feel like I am demonstrating that I am worthy of trust. If other people feel the same way, the ritual is also ineffective on them.
Entirely consistently with this, if some people think this is dumb, get tricked, want to troll etc, it is easy for them to press the button. Ensuring none of the hundred people are like this is a hard problem, and I agree with Oliver that that is an achievement
Thanks. So your point is that the “hard part” is to select who’s going to receive the codes.
It’s not an exercise on building trust, but on selecting who is reliable.
I imagined you would get people to volunteer in advance of Petrov Day and then choose who you trust from the list of volunteers (or trust all of them to collaborate, dealer’s choice)
But I really love the idea of people saying “I care about preserving humanity, I’m committed to the values of prudence and rationality, and I want to take part in observing this holiday”. I would love to see that group of people in action.
I do know that people are busy and easily distracted and probably wouldn’t sign up in advance, even if they would like to participate, based on my past experience of generally getting people to do things.
I do think we could build this list over multiple years though, while I previously thought that maybe the right choice is to just not sign up to volunteer, if you are in favor of the ritual, there is an argument that you should sign up to be a volunteer, because if you don’t we might have to pick someone who is more likely to press the button instead of you, which still creates a decent incentive, and I hadn’t considered before, but am overall still concerned about people just kind of not noticing the email and opt-in process until the day comes and they are sad they weren’t considered (or the ritual doesn’t happen at all because not enough people who are actually unlikely to press the button opted in).
Big fan of what you describe in the end or something similar.
It’s still not great, and it would still be hard to distinguish the people who opted-in and received the codes but decided not to use them from the people who just decided to not receive their codes in the first place
Not sure whether you mean it’s hard from the technical side to track who received their code and who didn’t (which would be surprising) or whether you mean distinguishing between people who opted out and people who opted in but decided not to see the code. If the latter: Any downside to just making it clear in the email that not receiving your code is treated as opting out? People who don’t read the email text should presumably not count anyway.
On the trust-building and adding to the voices in favor of making it opt-in: I like many aspects of this game, including the fact that doing the right thing is at least plausibly “do nothing and don’t tell anyone you’ve done/you’re doing the right thing.” But currently, the combination of no opt-in/opt-out and that it’s not anonymous doesn’t really make it feel like a trust-building exercise to me. It feels more like “Don’t push the button because people will seriously hate you if you do” and also “people will also get angry if you push the button because of an honest mistake, so it’s probably best to just protect yourself from information for a day” (see last year—although maybe people were more upset about the wording in some of the messages the person who pushed sent rather than being tricked into pushing itself?), which isn’t great. So, I think the lack of opt-in/out makes lots of people upset + it ruins the original purpose of this event IMO, and everyone is unhappy.
(Note: I haven’t been very involved with the planning for this year’s exercise, mostly leaving it to Ruby)
I quite like it as a real trust-building exercise. I think overall actually getting 100+ people on the internet to not take a destructive action like this is surprisingly hard, and I think it is a really great, surprisingly unique, attribute of our communities that we can coordinate on making things like this happen.
I find myself reasonably compelled by some of the arguments for something like “asking for opt-in before sending the codes”, though I don’t yet actually have a logistically good way of making this happen. I think having a whole two-step process where you ask people to register themselves on a list is quite onerous, and probably wouldn’t get a great response rate.
A thing that feels more reasonable to me is to instead of sending out the codes in the email in plain text, instead you get a link to a form that shows you the code at the end, after 1-2 boxes of dialog that ask you whether you are OK with there potentially being real consequences of you using these codes. It’s still not great, and it would still be hard to distinguish the people who opted-in and received the codes but decided not to use them from the people who just decided to not receive their codes in the first place (which is a safer move in the end, if you want to make sure you don’t use them).
What would you think of making button pressers anonymous? Currently, I will definitely not press the button because I know that this could plausibly lead to negative social consequences for me, and be clearly tied to my identity. Which is a purely self-interested thing, rather than me actually taking agency and choosing not to unilaterally destroy the world, and demonstrating myself to be worthy of trust. I imagine this is true for other people too? Which, to me, majorly undercuts the community ritual and trust-building angles
Alternately, maybe the social consequences are how people are coordinating?
For me, Petrov’s (and Arkhipov’s) legacy, the most important lesson, is that, in real MAD life, there should be no button at all.
Seeing Neel & Habryka’s apparent disagreement (the latter seems to think this is pretty hard, while the former thinks that the absence of incentives to press the button makes it too easy), I realize that it’d be interesting to have a long discussion, before the next Petrov Day, on what is the goal of the ritual and what we want to achieve with it.
My point: it’s cool practicing “not pressing buttons” and building trust on this, and I agree with Neel we could make it more challenging… but the real catch here is that, though we can bet the stability of some web pages on some sort of Assurance Game, it’s a tremendous tragedy that human welfare has to depend on the willingness of people like Petrov to not press buttons. I think this game should be a reminder of that .
To clarify my position, I PERSONALLY find not pressing the button extremely easy, because I am strongly incentivised to not do it. This means that I don’t personally feel like I am demonstrating that I am worthy of trust. If other people feel the same way, the ritual is also ineffective on them.
Entirely consistently with this, if some people think this is dumb, get tricked, want to troll etc, it is easy for them to press the button. Ensuring none of the hundred people are like this is a hard problem, and I agree with Oliver that that is an achievement
Thanks. So your point is that the “hard part” is to select who’s going to receive the codes. It’s not an exercise on building trust, but on selecting who is reliable.
Yes exactly
I imagined you would get people to volunteer in advance of Petrov Day and then choose who you trust from the list of volunteers (or trust all of them to collaborate, dealer’s choice)
But I really love the idea of people saying “I care about preserving humanity, I’m committed to the values of prudence and rationality, and I want to take part in observing this holiday”. I would love to see that group of people in action.
I do know that people are busy and easily distracted and probably wouldn’t sign up in advance, even if they would like to participate, based on my past experience of generally getting people to do things.
I do think we could build this list over multiple years though, while I previously thought that maybe the right choice is to just not sign up to volunteer, if you are in favor of the ritual, there is an argument that you should sign up to be a volunteer, because if you don’t we might have to pick someone who is more likely to press the button instead of you, which still creates a decent incentive, and I hadn’t considered before, but am overall still concerned about people just kind of not noticing the email and opt-in process until the day comes and they are sad they weren’t considered (or the ritual doesn’t happen at all because not enough people who are actually unlikely to press the button opted in).
Big fan of what you describe in the end or something similar.
Not sure whether you mean it’s hard from the technical side to track who received their code and who didn’t (which would be surprising) or whether you mean distinguishing between people who opted out and people who opted in but decided not to see the code. If the latter: Any downside to just making it clear in the email that not receiving your code is treated as opting out? People who don’t read the email text should presumably not count anyway.
On the trust-building and adding to the voices in favor of making it opt-in: I like many aspects of this game, including the fact that doing the right thing is at least plausibly “do nothing and don’t tell anyone you’ve done/you’re doing the right thing.” But currently, the combination of no opt-in/opt-out and that it’s not anonymous doesn’t really make it feel like a trust-building exercise to me. It feels more like “Don’t push the button because people will seriously hate you if you do” and also “people will also get angry if you push the button because of an honest mistake, so it’s probably best to just protect yourself from information for a day” (see last year—although maybe people were more upset about the wording in some of the messages the person who pushed sent rather than being tricked into pushing itself?), which isn’t great. So, I think the lack of opt-in/out makes lots of people upset + it ruins the original purpose of this event IMO, and everyone is unhappy.